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So little time and so very many apps. What's a poor iPhone lover to do? Fortunately, 148Apps is here to give you the rundown on the latest and greatest releases. And we even have a tremendous back catalog of reviews; just check out Reviews Archive for every single review we've ever written.

What was old is new again. Thanks to popularization of crowd-funding services like Kickstarter, many forlorn, neglected, and abused franchises of yesteryear are receiving a new lease on life. One such series seeing a massive resurgence is the strategy RPG and table-top classic, Shadowrun, which finally found its way to iOS in the form of the newly released Shadowrun Returns. Can it somehow live up to the nostalgia laced, sky-high expectations of fans, or will it suffer the same fate as the attempted Xbox 360 reboot? Looking back through the annals of history, the last time that a proper Shadowrun RPG was released, Sega was trying to hock the Sega CD. Thankfully, time has been kind to the genre, and the developer, Harebrained Schemes, has went to great lengths to assure that the title’s mechanics meet up with the expectations of a modern audience. The action itself plays out from a third-person, isometric view, akin to what would be found in most modern tactical RPGs, and is coupled with an extremely organic screen tapping control scheme. --Blake Grundman

Incredipede by Sarah and Colin Northway, is almost two different games built into one title. The first is the main adventure, one where players control Quozzle, a spunky little cyclops gal going through those awkward years where one doesn’t know how many limbs and muscles one has at any given time. There’s not just that, but there’s also the need to collect fruit to save the fellow members of one’s species who have been kidnapped. So the player, serving as the control agent for Quozzle’s muscles, tries to both get Quozzle to the end and to collect the fruit in the levels, which are used to unlock future levels. --Carter Dotson

I suppose a sign that a game is really good is when I lose all track of time; just constantly diving back in, ignoring all other responsibilities, just playing the game again and again until there’s no more game to play. That’s Pixel This! by Mark Brown , a game he created because “Most of the Picross apps on iOS kind of suck, so I made a better one.” Well, he succeeded. --Carter Dotson

As a freelance writer and small business owner, keeping tabs on all of my finances and projects can become quite daunting. Plugging numbers into excel, cross referencing projects and figuring out my profits are just a few tasks that can get overwhelming. Now that there’s an app for pretty much everything, I was intrigued by what Projector Up! had to offer myself and other freelancers. The app’s main purpose is management of accounting. It focuses only on small studios and freelancers and isn’t intended for big businesses. Aside from its simple and clean interface, Projector Up! boasts many features like goal tracking, financial planning and visual tracking. --Angela LaFollette

Gappy’s Mystery Letters is a charming and effective interactive letters app starring Gappy, the cartoony character from Spinlight Studios’ earlier app Gappy’s First Words. Here, Gappy will be thinking of a letter and asking children to trace with a finger a moving star which engages children to draw a letter that they will then match up with a series of letters to choose from. I believe that the sense of mystery, complete with fun and suspenseful music, will keep children engaged longer than simply tracing over a template which can oftentimes be scribbled over instead of specifically worked with, as this app taps into a child’s sense of wonder as they form these letters. Another nice moment is revealing the gift Gappy receives that corresponds with the letter in question, such as wagon for “W” – nicely stylized as an image later to be used as a coloring page – a nice touch as this cute moment will not register the way it would if Gappy were being given a whole lot of “stuff” like more tangible toys. I would, however, like to be able to control the speed that one needs in order to follow the star as I could see a child new to tracing or printing having difficulty at first – a minor concern really as this is a great app for those new to learning their letters but who are looking for something a little different. Also included is a blank drawing page as well as 52 coloring pages based on the alphabet that can be unlocked by slowly solving the mystery games found within this app. --Amy Solomon

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If you are looking for the best reviews of Android apps, just head right over to AndroidRundown. Here are just some of the reviews served up this week:

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Sometimes it is fun just to watch games. Anyone who’s played the Sims knows that watching the drama unfold can be as fun as creating the drama. These types of players will likely love Blood Battalion, a strategic RPG which is light on the gameplay and heavy on the spectacle. Players begin the game by selecting a hero. It’s possible to pick from such heroes as a healer girl who’s fairly useless in a fight, but has the vital ability to keep other troops alive, to a swordsman who has immense power but not much else. --Allan Curtis

Fast Cats and lava. Welcome to LavaCat from PocketCake. The basic premise is what one expects in a side-scrolling adventure: moving from the left of the screen to the right, the main objective is to get as far as possible without getting fried by any of the heat-related dangers that lined the playing area. In the interest of fair disclosure, it should be noted that the playing area is molten lava travelway with falling spikes and steam geysers that can do lethal damage to a poor little puddy cat. The controls are minimalist. One bank has a direction button set that controls “forward” and “backward” movement. There is also a jump button. An hourglass button rounds out the core controls. The cat remains stationary on the bottom surface unless a button is being held; not a lot of momentum is retained when movement in either direction is not engaged. --Tre Lawrence

Ever wanted to build a charming Roman village from the ground up, build a thriving economy and then shatter the peace by recruiting a huge army to crush friends and rivals, then look no further than Total Conquest, a new game from Gameloft where aspiring generals can do just that. In Total Conquest the player starts off with a Town Hall and not much else. From there villas are constructed to generate gold and farms are planted to generate food. Each building can be upgraded multiple times. Temples can be raised to gain blessings from the gods, bestowing faster or stronger attacks and players can also build a bunker like Militia building which garrisons troops in case of attack. --Allan Curtis

And finally, this week This week, Pocket Gamer reviewed The Cave and Transport Tycoon, crowned the best iOS and Android games of September, looked at the most exciting mobile games for this month, and went hands-on with The Room 2, Monument Valley, and Framed. Take a look, in PG's weekly wrap-up.

Mark Brown, perhaps best known for being Deputy Editor over at Pocket Gamer, has just released his first game; Pixel This!, an elegant Nonogram title that he made to try and improve on the other similar games on the App Store. Because of his unique position as both someone who covers mobile gaming, and now someone who made a mobile game - and he did it almost entirely on an iPad using Codea - I was eager to learn more about Pixel This! and the process of its creation.

(full disclosure: Pocket Gamer and 148Apps are owned by Steel Media, which had no say in the promotion or editorial coverage of this game)

148Apps: What compelled you to make Pixel This?

Mark Brown (MB): I just adore Picross (or Nonograms or Griddlers or whatever you want to call them) which is this brilliant puzzle game from Japan that's all about using logic and deduction to draw a cute pixel art image. I think I accidentally stumbled upon Mario's Picross on Game Boy, and have loved those puzzles ever since. But I don't think I've found an iOS app that has done the game justice.

They're usually a bit ugly, or make it hard to control on the teeny tiny iPhone screen. They can be expensive or, if they're free, jammed with adverts or costly IAPs. So I thought there was room to make something better! Pixel This! isn't perfect and there's plenty of room to improve, but I'm really pleased with the result and the feedback.

148Apps: Why go with the free+unlock model on the game?

MB: It's funny, because I'm a pretty staunch opponent of the free-to-play model, but here I am launching a free-to-play game on the App Store! But I think this is a good way to let people have a go with the game first, see if they can grasp the rules and see if they actually like the puzzles before putting down their cash. It is, I hope, a non-evil free-to-play where you're not buying hints or lives or anything else that's going to wreck the balance of the game. It's just more stuff if you liked the first stuff.

148Apps: Talk about that awesome soundtrack!

MB: Hah! Well, you've got to focus on what you know, and I do not know music at all. So I decided to not subject anyone to my pitiful attempts to make a soundtrack, and want to encourage them to play their own music instead. Plus, I've always found that Picross is a fun thing to do while listening to podcasts or the radio, so it was super important that audio from other apps would continue playing when you load Pixel This!

148Apps: You made the game primarily on the iPad? How did you do this? What compelled you to work particularly on mobile?

MB: I programmed Pixel This in an iPad app called Codea, which lets you write Lua code on the tablet and then export it to Apple's developer program Xcode so you can submit it to the App Store. So the only time I used my Mac was to do the graphics in Photoshop and then some final code to get in-app purchases and Twitter support working. It's really cool to be able to write some code, hit a button, and then be immediately testing the game on one of the devices that the game will eventually be released on.

I'm also a big iPad nerd, and a huge believer in the idea that this whole "tablets are for consumption not creation" thing is totally bunkum. It's such a wonderful device to use, and the apps are only getting better, more powerful, and more flexible.

148Apps: As someone who covers the mobile space, does making games of your own change the way that you perceive them, and did your perspective as member of the gaming media affect development in any way?

MB: There are certain things we take for granted as journalists and players of games. We might flippantly say "this game should have iCloud saves and Game Center!!", without realizing how many weeks of work and testing that all involves. I don't think I'm going to stop complaining about missing features, slow updates, and missed release dates, mind you! But the experience will definitely color my view of development going forward.

As for the other way around, I think by being forced to play a billion iOS games a week makes me made hyper-aware of what works - and what doesn't - on the App Store. I hate being nagged by push notifications and I don't like being asked to review a game every five seconds, so I avoided that sort of stuff. But for the most part, I just feel very lucky to have my dumb little game on the same platform as so many amazing apps from so many hugely talented people. It's weird and awesome.